Mark had a horrid experience today.
He has got an especially tiresome job to do in the back garden.
In the place where the shed used to be, there is a slab of concrete. This needs to be broken up and moved in order to build the new flower beds in its place.
Today he started to break it up and move it.
It did not take very long before he discovered, to his dismay, that whoever had built the shed and laid the concrete, had laid it on the top of another, far more ancient, slab of concrete, which was probably put there when the house was being built.
I don’t know if they had concrete back in the eighteen sixties. The underneath layer of concrete was not much like the top one. It was darker, and lumpier, and much harder. Mark said it was made from sand dredged from the lake, which is one of the hardest sands that there is.
Mark cut channels through it, and drilled holes in it, and finally dug down underneath it, with his pickaxe and shovel. Once he had mined a deep enough hollow, he rolled his hydraulic jack into it, and slowly jacked the huge concrete slab upwards.
Once it had lifted free of the ground he began to bash it with his huge hammer. It broke up then.
This was when the awful thing happened. His hammer caught on the washing line, which he had not thought to move, twisted in his hands, and hit him on the head.
He had the most enormous lump.
Lucy and I found him lying on the floor, clutching his head and swearing dizzily. We hardly laughed at all, even at the sentence ‘I hit myself on the head with the hammer’.
I ran a towel under the cold tap and we pressed it to the lump. Then we helped him take his boots off and he went upstairs to lie down until it felt better.
He could do things like count my fingers, and he was more or less the right colour, give or take a layer of concrete dust, so we thought probably he would be all right. I thought about asking him if he knew who the prime minister was, but that isn’t really a useful question to ask a concussed person any more, why should they know any more than the rest of us?
It was a good job that we didn’t think he was concussed, because he went instantly to sleep, which is not a good thing for a concussed person to do. In this case we decided that probably being tired was the problem, and left him to it.
I am pleased to report that he did not die, but woke up a couple of hours later, feeling refreshed, albeit with a sore head, after which he continued smashing up the concrete.
In the meantime Lucy and I were doing some housekeeping lessons.
She will be moving into her own house in a couple of months, and it is important that her culinary expertise extends beyond Pot Noodles and bananas.
Today we learned how to cook a chicken.
I do not like chicken skin, so I put all of the chicken spices under the skin. It seems ridiculous to smear oyster sauce blended with five spice and garlic all over the chicken skin and then leave it on the side of your plate.
She was very pleased with her efforts when she had finished. We poured the liquid into a pot to make rice tomorrow, and then I made soap.
Lucy did not think that she needed to know how to make soap, since you can purchase it at a very reasonable price in Boots, but she watched anyway, and talked about arrangements for her new life. This is approaching at the speed of a taxi which thinks the traffic lights are about to change colour, and we are all getting very excited about it.
We went to the gym together afterwards. This is an important part of being a good cook, I am afraid. The one makes the other a regrettable necessity.
You will be pleased to hear that Mark is quite all right now. We are at work. He made some creative cheese on toast for our dinner whilst Lucy and I were in the gym. Mine was Red Leicester with a heart in the middle of it made out of the yellow Cheddar cheese. I thought this was very lovely, and he laughed and said it was mostly because he had not got very much of the yellow cheese, and was making it last.
It was lovely all the same.
